21: The Last Night with Taiwan's Sunflower Movement
By Jesse Steele
()
About this ebook
On March 18, 2014, Taiwanese students known as the "Sunflower Movement" peacefully occupied their nation's legislature. Three weeks later, after their peaceful demonstration raised national and global awareness of the dangers of secret negotiations with China, they withdrew.
This inside story tells the last 21 hours of the non-violent occupancy and includes background, politics, peace, and love.
Jesse Steele
Today's news, yesterday.TM I'm an American writer in Asia who wears many hats. I learned piano as a kid, studied Bible in college, and currently do podcasting, web contenting, cloud control, and brand design. I like golf, water, speed, music, kung fu, art, and stories.
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21 - Jesse Steele
21
The Last Night with Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement
Jesse Steele
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2014 Jesse Steele
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced for sale in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in periodical articles or reviews.
books.JesseSteele.com
books@jessesteele.com
Jesse Steele on Smashwords
ISBN: 9-781-310-095-641
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
For personal enjoyment only, you are welcome to share this ebook with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial and non-theatrical purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by Jesse Steele. Thank you for your support.
For Taiwan
Whose futures is intertwined with America’s
Table of Contents
For Taiwan
Introduction
Different Democracies
Students Take the Floor
How Sunflowers Got Their Name
My Two Trips
Flowers for Police
Cleanup
Prayer Walks
Exit
Appendix: Sunflower Movement Articles by Jesse Steele
Taiwan Legislature ‘Occupied/Retaken’: USA Media Ignores
Sunflower Movement: A Day on the Ground
Puppet Democracies Are for Children: Washington ‘Adults’ Don't Understand
'Sunflower' Students Change History
Acknowledgements
About the Author
❁ Introduction ❁
This is a story about the last 21 hours I spent inside the occupied legislature in Taipei, beginning on the evening of Wednesday, April 9, 2014, until the students vacated. I’m not sure what to write in this introduction, probably because I wasn’t planning to write the book. News just happened
and so did this book.
I could talk about journalistic style, but I’ve already developed my own and it speaks for itself. I suppose I should say something about journalistic ethics—not censoring important facts, not revealing names or private information, not giving equal time to truth and lies, and making sure that the truth gets a fair trial.
So, here’s the book. All photos and artwork is my own, including the Chinese characters on the cover, which I painted mainly due to a shortage of satisfactory fonts. I would have liked to include pictures in the eBook, but an eBook is not the best way to view photos and the book file would be terribly huge. If I ever publish a hard copy, I may include photos. For now, photos from the stories in this book can be viewed on a Flickr photostream here.
Like Bilbo’s story, this was an unexpected journey. But, it wasn’t just a journey for me. It was a journey for everyone, including the Taiwanese, the Chinese, the West, and the history of freedom.
❁ Different Democracies ❁
How could a group of 200 unarmed college students take over a national legislature?
It’s hard for an American to understand Taiwanese politics. Taiwan has one of the few young democracies in the world and it is emerging without American intervention. Arguably, the French helped toward the end of the American revolution, but the colonies mostly fought for their own freedom. While the US has been an ally and kept Taiwan safe from Beijing’s missiles, their democracy has developed mostly on its own, which makes it unusually real. America’s democracy is two centuries older than Taiwan’s, but America may have forgotten how to learn.
Under Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan was somewhat of a soft but bloody dictatorship. One of the more infamous horror stories was the 228 Massacre, or the 228 Incident
as the responsible Kuomintang Nationalist
party (KMT) refers to it. The KMT fled to Taiwan’s main island in 1949, Formosa, taking refuge from the Communist revolution. After rearranging their government for exile, the local language, Taiwanese, was outlawed in schools and public places in an attempt to standardize the island with Mandarin. Taiwan entered survival mode
and Beijing was never able to take the island.
Democracy developed slowly. Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, eventually took over, rising in Taiwan’s political leadership from the 1950’s until the dynastic presidency ended in 1988. Taiwan had their first democratic presidential election in 1996 when China sent a missile over the island. Though China supplied the fireworks
free of charge, their intent was to protest, not celebrate.
The reasons for China’s missile launch are known only to Beijing’s Communist leaders. While it may have been intended to caution Taiwan against moving toward independence from the Communist state, the actual result was that the world became more cautions of China in general. In all likelihood, that unintended consequence never occurred to Beijing’s think tank, just as the peaceful Sunflower Movement of 2014 was not anticipated by Taiwan’s heavy-handed KMT.
A Taiwanese friend once explained, Americans have opened minds, but closed hearts. Chinese Asians have open hearts, but closed minds.
This is why the United States and Taiwan desperately need a close friendship. Both have been forced into pioneering their own democracies, yet they have different and complimenting lessons to learn from each other.
In 2014, as democracy continued to develop, Taiwan’s legislature was occupied by Sunflower Movement
students for just over three weeks in a peaceful protest and call to constitutional rule of law. In my first few hours inside the occupied legislature, I met a young man who happened to be on a nearby island where China’s presidential fireworks
missile detonated in 1996. The windows on our house shook,
he said.
Mitch Yang, a Taiwanese with credentials in NASA, was in the United States in 1996. We talked in the back foyer an hour after I entered the occupied legislature. A group of Taiwanese in the US had arranged protests at the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles in response to China’s 1996 missile. The demonstrations gained attention of the national press and, being educated and fluent in Chinese, Mitch served as the movement’s spokesman and was interviewed by NBC, ABC, and CBS.
In our brief chat, he explained that Taiwanese President Ma wants unification